Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Monday August 23, 2010 @11:28AM
from the i-blame-politics dept.

jamie writes "The US National Helium Reserve stores a billion cubic meters of helium, half the world supply, in an old natural gasfield. The array of pipes and mines runs 200 miles from Texas to Kansas. In the name of deficit reduction, we're selling it all off for cheap. Physics professor and Nobel laureate Robert Richardson says: 'In 1996, the US Congress decided to sell off the strategic reserve and the consequence was that the market was swelled with cheap helium because its price was not determined by the market. The motivation was to sell it all by 2015. The basic problem is that helium is too cheap. The Earth is 4.7 billion years old and it has taken that long to accumulate our helium reserves, which we will dissipate in about 100 years. One generation does not have the right to determine availability forever.' Another view is The Impact of Selling the Federal Helium Reserve, the government study from 10 years ago that suggested the government's price would end up being over market value by 25% — but cautioned that this was based on the assumption that demand would grow slowly, and urged periodic reviews of the state of the industry."

Great post. There is some great basic information about the Element at Helium Facts [thefreeresource.com] that might be helpful. Where as I think balloons are part of the issue that article shows many other used for helium that might be contributing to the idea that we are running out of the gas. Some include as an inert gas shield for arc welding, a protective gas in growing silicon and germanium crystals and producing titanium and zirconium, as a cooling medium for nuclear reactors, and as a gas for supersonic wind tunnels.

Good linkOnce helium does run out we can still use hydrogen to fill those party balloons for the kidsAnd after the kids crap out and go to bed, the adults can play "Balloon meets Cigarette" for some drinking fun

Ah, "Balloon meets cigarette". When I was a kid there was this piece of shit on two legs, he loved to pop up on kids at funfairs and blow up their balloons with his cig. He'd go "oops, sorry" and walk away while the kids cried.We filled some balloons with a mixture of hydrogen and air, and tied them to an empty pushchair about 30 meters from the fair near the parking lot. Of course, he couldn't resist, thinking the kid would be around to see his precious balloons pop. He took a nice long drag on his cig, touched the balloon with the lit end and...

The other half of the problem is that it is relatively unreactive. Hydrogen is abundant on Earth only because it bonds with oxygen. The resulting water is heavy enough to hang around. If hydrogen did not form compounds like this then it would be lost from the atmosphere too.

Of course, 100 years is a long time. Helium is formed as a product of hydrogen fusion - that was how most of it formed, in stars, originally. Even without fusion power, we can manufacture helium in tabletop fusors. Even run below break-even energy, they still produce helium as a byproduct, so we're running out but this can be balanced at the cost of energy.

Yeah, we can permanently destroy water to create electricity. Great plan.

Yes, and it's up there with groping crops for biofuel. Humans are starving and we are feeding our FOOD to the MACHINES!! Great plan! When the machines realize we are competition for their energy, we're all screwed.

What's your point? Hemp's not illegal. I even own a hemp golf shirt - feels great!

Actually, in the US, it is illegal to grow Hemp. The reason being that the DEA can't tell the difference from the air. The clothes you wear made of the material were most likely grown and manufactured in Canada.

Um, no, more gravity would only make it worse... because everything else (except for hydrogen) would also be heavier too. Meaning that the helium would be expelled even faster. (its exponentially dense) You'd need a microgravity environment with some turbidity to keep it well-mixed (around)

Funny how helium is one of the most abundant elements in the whole UNIVERSE and we have a shortage!!!

Helium is the second most abundant element at 25%. Hydrogen is the most abundant at 75%. The rest amount to a rounding error at this time.

Mind you, it's interesting to note that Oxygen and Carbon are the next two most abundant elements in our galaxy, and both are vital for life. Which way the causation runs, I wonder - does the known life in our galaxy use these elements because they are common, or does our

Do you know what doesn't matter to those problems? Inside-the-home water use doesn't matter. The majority of water use is for power generation. The majority of the remainder is used in agriculture. The majority of the remainder is used for landscaping. Yet the federal government tells me how much water I can use when I flush my toilet or takes a shower? It's the worst sort of nonsense.

If you're on the ocean and have a "water shortage", try using saltwater in your generators (only Cali does, IIRC) befo

Ahh, but that's not a materials scarcity problem, but merely a cost of infrastructure problem. Since we charge money for drinking water, and for sewer, any such problem can be overcome by simply charging the real cost to the end user. That way we all have the freedom to decide between conservation and spending more to get more.

I like how we can talk about peak helium but the second you try to discuss peak oil or peak coal you're a treehugger, an alarmist or trying to destroy the economy. I guess we have to wait until we're certain we're only a century away from using the last of a resource that took the Earth 4.7 billion years to accumulate before it's okay to start to talk about appropriate measures...

we can talk about peak helium but the second you try to discuss peak oil or peak coal you're a treehugger

Not really seeing how that's a troll, it's the truth. Maybe because helium doesn't have billions in Saudi oil money, funding from the Koch family and The Carlyle Group trying to influence social opinions about balloons.

Actually, we can make helium too. A tabletop Fusor can be made for a few thousand dollars and will make helium out of hydrogen as long as you keep it fed with enough energy. The only reason that we don't is cost - it's cheaper to get helium out of the ground than to make it. Exactly the same thing applies to oil.

World energy consumption is 15 terawatts. Assuming my gp calculations are correct, and all energy was produced by fusion, there would be 36 million cubic meters of helium created each year. At that rate it would be 30 years to generate the billion cubic meters that was in the reserve in 1995.

Apparently, they forgot that without a large supply of helium operating their favorite cash cow, the manned space flight program, would become a lot harder. There are also many scientific applications that are virtually impossible without helium, with its boiling point at 4.1 Kelvin. Hydrogen, at 14 Kelvin, is not a perfect replacement, and has a tendency to explode. They really ought to be inflating the price, so we learn to conserve helium now while we still have plenty left.

When the helium on Earth runs out, space flight suddenly looks a lot more commercially interesting. Helium is abundant in the universe, it's only rare at the bottom of our gravity well. There are large deposits on the moon, there almost certainly are on asteroids as well, and it can be harvested from the solar wind. With sufficiently cheap energy, you can also make it from hydrogen in a fusor. If you want something to motivate commercial space flight, use up the helium reserves quickly and then watch pe

True, but then the concern becomes whether commercial mining activity will ramp up before the local price or sheer scarcity of helium makes speculative exploration impractical. If the price stays artificially low, the commercial incentive won't be there until it's too late, and we'll be up a gravity well without a rocket, so to speak. Somebody on this planet really ought to have a stockpile of helium for when that time comes. That's the whole point of a strategic helium reserve--so that we have it when we really need it, not for f***ing party balloons.

Once we get fusion reactors perfected, won't there be an abundant supply of helium? We only need enough helium to hold out until then. If we run low, the law of supply and demand should make it prohibitively expensive to waste the stuff on parties and get-well balloons.

I live in Amarillo Tx, what this article fails to mention is all the helium we still have here, We shut down refining after we had enough stored, we didn't stop because we ran out of helium to refine. Our plant is still here waiting to be used comes the time to gather more. It's good to know people can make up stories about resource and how little we have left to stir up some sort of reaction. Now if oil disappears, worry.....

But helium isn't burned or consumed or changed into something else, so we still have it when we are done using it. It's not like the helium is going to vanish into thin air.

No, it's going to vanish to outer space [wikipedia.org]. Temperature of a gas is a measure of the average kinetic energy of a single molecule; since helium atoms don't form molecules and are very light, they tend to have very high velocities in a given temperature. So high, in fact, that they exceed Earth's escape velocity; while molecules at lower atmosphere will likely collide with other molecules before escaping, those in in the upper atmosphere will simply go up and never come down again.

No; the thermal velocity of a molecule is srqt(<v^2>) = sqrt(3kT/m), with k Boltzmann's constant and m the molecular mass. At room temperature (293 K), this velocity is 1.35 km/s, while the escape velocity is 11 km/s. (By the way, for nitrogen, the thermal velocity is 0.51 km/s). Statistical mechanics predicts that only one molecule in 10^29 has a velocity exceeding the escape velocity of the earth.

However, it is true that helium will reach farther than nitrogen and oxygen; the gravitational potential energy is comparable to the thermal energy at an altitude of 62 km (compare 9 km for nitrogen).

I'm not sure what does cause the helium loss; maybe the helium gets blown away by the solar wind?

While the average thermal velocity is lower than the escape velocity, the high velocity tail of the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution is what's significant on long time scales.

It's important to state that room temperature isn't the most important number here. As you pointed out, the equilibrium point is high up in the atmosphere, where the gas is very dilute and can heat to a thousand degrees or more (solar UV heating and some contribution from solar wind). When you plug that temperature into the M-B thermal distribution, the fraction of atoms exceeding the escape velocity of Earth is much larger! In absolute terms, it's still a small number but enough to leak the helium out of the atmosphere over many millions of years.

Ultimately, it is the high thermal velocity that causes the loss of helium.

Pet peeve wrt the summary, which quotes Richardson as saying that the price was low because a lot of helium became available, which meant that the "price was not determined by the market."

But this is what markets do, they use the power of pricing to set the balance between supply and demand. If you introduce a large additional supply of a resource with low marginal cost to a market, the market's price mechanism will reduce the price of that resource. The market will determine a low price.

The observed behavior wrt the price of Helium is the opposite of "not determined by the market".

There are enough flame wars around about the merits of markets as a means of determining prices, and IMHO they have their limits, but FFS, can we at least have educated professionals know what a market is and what it does? Markets are pitiless, soulless mechanisms for matching up buyers and sellers of resources, and disclosing price information, period full stop. They have no a priori relationship to fairness, justice, accessibility, or legality, and only a tangential relationship to efficiency.

I think you're confused. The price was set in the "Helium Privitization Act of 1996," that's simply a fact and has nothing to do with market forces.

When the government makes a law which says "we will sell our helium for $1.50 per cubic meter until it is gone" and that supply is 1/3 the global total market for two decades, the "market" has not set the price.

Because a government is supported by taxes, backed by a military, not accountable to share holders and has several other special privileges.

Is this really confusing? A government is not the same as a private individual. This case perfectly demonstrates that. Why does the government have this helium? Did they pay for it, or just claim it? Did they pay for the storage space, or just claim it? Do they pay taxes on its sale? These are not hard things to think of.

Not quite. He was commenting on the price the Fed was selling its helium at, which was set by legislation and has not changed. While it was approximately 25% higher than market price at the time of the act, it has since acted as a ceiling on the price of helium.

In 1996, the US Congress decided to sell off the strategic reserve and the consequence was that the market was swelled with cheap helium because its price was not determined by the market.

Uh, what? If the helium was sold and not given away, bled into the atmosphere, or some other odd thing done to it, the price was determined by the market. You may question the wisdom of putting it all on the market at the same time and getting a lower price for it than if you doled it out bit-by-bit, but I think the market did fine in determining the price in a glutted market.

This is the problem when you get experts in one field (in this case physics) talking about things in other fields, like economics - quite often, they are no better informed then any other layman. If the government buys and/or sells something on the open market, it's part of the market, umkayyy? And you don't need to be a Nobel Laureate to understand this. The fact that this was wrapped up in a nasty little bit of anti-government sentiment makes it clear that Richardson was more interested in scoring political points than enlightening the public.

"One generation does not have the right to determine availability for ever.", eh? Helium, eh? Let us all form a circle and talk about how we should all help save the helium for our grandchildren and ignore that we already used up more than half the oil, plutonium and other important energy sources. And copper. And we are killing off a whole range of biological diversity. But let us all ignore that and talk about the helium.

"One generation does not have the right to determine availability for ever.", eh? Helium, eh? Let us all form a circle and talk about how we should all help save the helium for our grandchildren and ignore that we already used up more than half the oil, plutonium and other important energy sources. And copper. And we are killing off a whole range of biological diversity. But let us all ignore that and talk about the helium.

The difference: compared to helium, even oil is a renewable resource. Oil can be made reasonably cheaply (maybe $200/bbl) from air, water and sunshine, as any rapeseed or olive farmer could demonstrate. Copper is not "used up", it's merely dug up in one place and buried somewhere else in form of cables. Helium is different: once the cheap stuff from rock fissures is gone, it can never be retrieved again. Then you can only create it by super-expensive fusion processes, which makes it 4, 5 or even 10 orders o

Your basic blimp uses as much fuel in a WEEK of operations as a 747 uses taxiing from the gate to the runway. We need to get people out of these wasteful planes and into a more efficient (and comfortable) form of air transport.

The Hindenburg had 36 passengers and 61 crew, so 97 passenger load total. 10 crew should be enough (Pilot, Copilot, Backup Navigator, Mechanic, Mechanic, Stewardess, 4 more) on a modern blimp, so 87. "Airship" seems to me an apt term, since these travel at around 80mph or so with a passenger load of maybe 100.

Although the throughput's lower, this should supply ample cargo load capacity for continuous supply line: taking out the passenger amenities (seats!), a cargo bay has higher capacity by weight due

http://www.aerospace-technology.com/projects/cargolifter/ [aerospace-technology.com] "The CargoLifter CL 160 is a semi-rigid airship under development by CargoLifter AG, a German company that plans to build airships capable of carrying enormous loads for the bulk air freight market. In May 2002, the CL 160 development was halted due to financial problems and the status of the programme is uncertain. In June 2002, the company made an application for insolvency. In August 2002, work on Cargolifter's other major programme, the CL 75 lift

While watching the Macey's Parade last year, they mentioned that the parade balloons (big charlie brown, etc) makes it the single largest helium user in the US (maybe world?) next to the US Government.

This is not about balloon animals, and it's not your typical media scare story.

I'm a condensed matter physicist. It's very common in my field to use helium to examine the properties of materials at very low temperatures. This is how things like superconductors and quantum computing are often worked on in their early stages. Using helium is important, and because universities don't like concentrated hydrogen (for safety reasons), pretty much required.

The current supply of helium is uncertain. Many research institutes (like the university I work at) have rationed helium. That is, we're allowed to buy a certain amount, and can't get more than that. This is set by the suppliers, who get their helium from the US government. The result is that my experiments compete with the experiments in particle physics, the medical school and other groups for helium. Sometimes I get it, sometimes I can't. From a practical viewpoint, we're not running out of helium in 2015, we're running out now.

There is helium available somewhere else, but there's no economic incentive for anyone to capture it and sell it. As long as stockpiles are sold off at fixed, below-market prices (TFA says helium should be 20 to 50 times more expensive), no one can economically afford to capture and purify the helium which is available. We're wasting the tail end of potential helium production (most in the stockpiles came from oil processing). Think of it this way: when oil runs out, helium runs out. We can replace oil much more cheaply than we can replace helium. Helium is too light an element to be captured by Earth's gravitational field this close to the sun, so that wasted helium is gone.

Many research institutes (like the university I work at) have rationed helium...This is set by the suppliers, who get their helium from the US government...As long as stockpiles are sold off at fixed, below-market prices (TFA says helium should be 20 to 50 times more expensive), no one can economically afford to capture and purify the helium which is available

I don't understand why the basic science of economics is so often ignored. If government fixes prices, you get shortages. Moreover, you reduce the

Helium has many uses even though it is inert. There are three major uses for helium.It is used in low-temperature cooling systems and pressure, lighter-than-air objects and purge systems.

Helium can be very useful in low-temperature cooling because at -270*, or liquid temperature, is able to cool anything because it is so cold. A good example of this as useful is in superconducting devices, because superconducting (electricity can pass from one place to another without wasting any energy) can occur only at very low temperatures.In pressure systems a gas is used to pressurize the system but the gas is not acceptable if it is able to react with any of the surroundings. Helium is an inert gas that is ideal for these situations. As well, in a purge system an inert gas is used to sweep all gas in a container without reacting with the contents, being inert it is ideal for these situations as well.Helium is ideal for blimps, balloons and other lighter-than-air crafts because it is neither flammable nor have the lifting effects of hydrogen, this makes it much safer. Although only used for advertising and other limited purposes, it is an ideal element to make these possible.....

So once per exp(-100) ~ 10^-43 attempts at escaping helium atom manages to do so. Probabilty 10^-34 is very small, but it sharply depends on temperature. Throw in 1000K and you have p ~ 10^-13, which means rather quick escape.

I gather from the above that although helium can escape earths atmosphere, it does so very slowly.

In the end, it seems foolish to me to release a known finite resource (finite as to what our technology can easily harvest today) to the hands of whim.

Helium can be formed a couple of other ways. One is fusion of course. The other is radioactive decay. We have lots of that, even very low activity decay going on, it's a matter of bothering to trap the helium from it. Of course if you can find some way to induce alpha decay then you could produce helium (e.g. if you could neutron induce it like with fission or something else). Some alpha emitters have a fairly long decay chain where they will spit out several alpha particles before they stop, so it's not like you're taking thorium, and then getting radium and helium, you'd get potentially 6 heliums and lead (or stop somewhere else on the decay chain).

But overall, yes, the relative lack of helium in future could pose serious problems. Wasting it on party balloons is destroying a potentially very useful product.

Very true, some of it is politcal. You don't want people in the habit of wasting helium for the fun of it and then thinking it isn't worth anything.

It's much the same with water conservation, whether you use a low flow toilet or a low flow shower isn't actually going to change how much water you waste by much (waste I would consider evaporated and lost to the existing water system, relative the amount typically received from similar sources).

In the Earth's atmosphere, the concentration of helium by volume is only 5.2 parts per million. The concentration is low and fairly constant despite the continuous production of new helium because most helium in the Earth's atmosphere escapes into space by several processes

I was thinking the exact same thing - it's not like we're feeding it all into a fusion plant and leaving none for later generations, they just might have to expend the energy to recapture and re-purify it.

Umm.... It leaves the earth. You know is is lighter than air so it goes up and away.It is not like Oxygen, or Argon, or Neon, or Nitrogen.It also isn't like Hydrogen which when released is so reactive that a good a precentage will combine with other elements and tend to stick around.So yes it is pretty much gone.

Not only that. It was a strategic reserve for something we do not USE, blimps. Yes blimps. It was created so the USAF and Army would have a place to get helium for blimps. What both of those forces quickly realized is blimps are sitting air targets with any sort of SAM.

What most of these guys are seeing is a end to the mega cheap way of getting helium and are thinking it will cost them 25% or more to get. They want the Gov to get back into the field of getting them cheap helium.

Actually no.It was for the Navy. The Army, Army Air Corp, and later USAF really didn't get into air ships much.They may have used it for barrage balloons but Hydrogen is just as good since you don't care a whole lot of those burn.And it was for not just blimps but also Zeppelins.

When created it made all the sense in the world. In the 1920s and 30s how could anybody bomb the US? Only by airship. Well maybe if Mexico or Canada decided to go to war with the US but that was unlikely.

BTW the Navy used it in AEW blimps up till the 1960s I believe and are thinking about bringing back airships as sensor platforms. We are not too concerned about SAMS since SAM sites tend to have a short life time and MANPADs lack the range to hit airships.

Why not?We deal with large amounts of chemical energy every day.While putting turbines like that over a city would be dumb even with Helium I don't see a big problem with using Hydrogen for this.Don't let the Hindenberg syndrome scare you. That crash wasn't any worse than hundreds of aircraft crashes that have happened since. It just happen to be filmed.

Personally, as a Christian I'd like to see the line that says the earth isn't ~4.5 billion years old, because I can't find it...

Young Earth Creationism (hence YEC) is a hyper-literalistic reading of the book of Genesis that has been always somewhat rare in Judaism, and not always supported by even those considered mainline Christian fathers.

For YEC to be true, pretty much everything we think we know about physics, astronomy, cosmology, molecular biology and genomics must be wrong.

The good news is that YEC is not the only, or even the best reading of Genesis. See this FAQ [talkorigins.org] for a brief overview, this book [amazon.com] for a much more complete overview, and this book [amazon.com] if you want a really good, in-depth study of the book of Genesis from a conservative scholar. It's a bit dry, and doesn't give you conclusions as much as really dig into the text, but it's highly recommended if you're serious about approaching the issue rigorously.

I've read many books on the topic, and in my opinion these are the best of the lot. Especially Beyond The Firmament, which is fairly easy read and the best introduction to the issues I've seen.

Perhaps obviously, these books are geared more towards Christians and showing them how to deal with what we believe is an important book, and not towards convincing others that Christianity and the Bible are true. Except perhaps that they might show that not all Christians are (complete) loonies...

Helium is lighter than all the other gasses in our atmosphere. So it floats to the top and is eventually lost. The Earth isn't big enough to gravitationally keep any atmospheric helium, so it all eventually disappears into space.

We're steadily losing our atmosphere to space by a process rather like conventional thermal evaporation, and we're losing helium far, far quicker than anything else because of its low mass and subborn refusal to form heavy compounds.